The first iPhone 5 reviews have lifted, confirming the leaked Geekbench data we saw in our earlier post. Apple's A6 appears to feature two custom ARM cores running at up to 1GHz. A new datapoint comes courtesy of our own Brian Klug who's currently visiting LG in Seoul, South Korea. He ran into Vincent Nguyen of Slashgear fame, who kindly let him run SunSpider 0.9.1 on Vincent's iPhone 5 review sample. The score? 914.7ms.

SunSpider is quickly outlasting its welcome as a smartphone benchmark, but it does do a great job of highlighting issues with the Cortex A9's memory interface. Intel originally hinted at issues in the A9's memory interface as being why Atom was able to so easily outperform other ARM based SoCs in SunSpider. As we surmised in our A6 Geekbench post, it looks like Apple specifically targeted improvements in the memory subsystem when designing the A6's CPU cores. The result is the fastest SunSpider test we've ever recorded on a smartphone - faster even than Intel's Atom Z2460.

This doesn't tell us much about the A6's architecture other than it's likely got a better cache/memory interface than ARM's Cortex A9. What we really need is for someone to port SPECint to iOS...

I think the international Galaxy S III finally surpassed the GPU in the iPhone 4S, but it's not even going to be close to what's in the 5. Apple doesn't seem to mess around when it comes to GPU. What's different this time is that the CPU is meets or exceeds what any competitor is currently offering.Reply

"A little bit of casual benchmarking using the GLBenchmark Egypt High test yielded a score of 6766, while the iPhone 4S got 1158. The Offscreen test was closer: 16681 vs 8346. This looks like a lot more than day to day usage bears out, but it suggests that there's headroom for the iPhone 5 to do some pretty impressive stuff."

Pretty biased. Some of the so called cons of the iPhone for you, is what makes it a best seller for everyone else. It's not for you, fine, get over it. No need to measure your GS3 decision by that of an iPhone lol. Reply

That Nexus S score is about twice what it should be, likely stemming from the fact that it was measured under Gingerbread stock browser and never updated. Running ICS/JB and using Chrome, the Nexus S gets a score nearly twice as fast - I get ~3200ms on Jelly Bean with Chrome my original Galaxy S, running the same 1GHz S5PC110/Hummingbird/Exynos 3110/whatever it's officially called this week.

If you aren't going to update it - which is understandable, perhaps you don't still have any first-gen Galaxy S hardware available - then you should probably just remove it.Reply

Devices are tested and scored as shipped, for multiple reasons. First, the stock configuration provides a solid performance baseline for the device. People who are already familiar with the device will likely be familiar with the performance of the stock configuration, allowing them to assign meaning to the device's score. People who are unfamiliar with the device can look at its score and compare it to devices they are familiar with and get an idea of what kind of performance they can expect OOTB.

If you do allow tweaking, where do you draw the line? If you're allowed to install Jelly Bean on your phone, can I install an OS that only runs SunSpider on mine? What about overclocking? If my phone completes the test before its circuits fuse, my score still counts, right?Reply

The iPhone 4's score has clearly been updated for new versions of iOS, as at launch http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-re...">it scored over 10,000. Why shouldn't Android devices receive the same treatment? Jelly Bean for the Nexus S isn't a "tweak" or "hack," it's an official stable release by Google.Reply